Tag Archives: women entrepreneurs

Politics Belong in Science Fiction | Foz Meadows at Huffington Post (May 2): “Science fiction both is, and always has been, a political genre. When we tell stories about a future in outer space populated entirely by white people, who constitute a global minority; when we describe societies set a hundred, three hundred, a thousand years in the future but which still lack gender equality, and whose sexual mores mimic those of the 1950s, that is no less a political decision than choosing to write diversely.”

Dear columnists, romance fiction is not your [slur] | Kay Mayo at The Drum (April 17) (update: warning for gendered slur, with violent implications, in the title of this piece): “I’d like to know: why is romance fiction the punching bag of the literary world? Why are romance readers the laughing-stock of feminist commentators? Why can’t people just let women read sexy things without telling us we’re doing something wrong? When writers deride romance readers for their reading choices, their argument becomes meaningless, and here’s why: not all romance books are the same. When someone insists that there is a formula for romance fiction, it’s clear that they haven’t bothered to look at any serious analyses of the genre, nor do they understand what “genre” actually means.”

Comics Legend Brian Michael Bendis on Sexism and Making a Nonwhite Spider-Man | Abraham Riesman at Vulture (May 2): “When you become the writer of Spider-Man, all of a sudden, every day, every week, every month, someone of color — all different races — comes up to you and tells you, “Spider-Man was my favorite and this is why,” and then I hear a version of this story: “My friends, when I was a kid, wouldn’t let me be Superman, wouldn’t let me be Batman, because of my skin color. But I could always be Spider-Man, and Spider-Man became my favorite. As a little kid, I didn’t even understand why he was my favorite, but it was because anybody could be Spider-Man under that costume, because it was head-to-toe.” That’s not why we created a Spider-Man who’s a person of color, but afterwards, I was like, “Oh man, this was subconsciously why we did it.””

Silence Is Not Synonymous With Uproar: A Response To John C. Wright | foz meadows (May 7): “So, author John C. Wright wrote a thing on the evils of political correctness in SFF [..] Let me show you the problem I’m having. [..] You cannot state, as your opening premise, that SFF fandom is being handicapped by silence and an unwillingness to speak out, and then support that premise by stating the exact polar opposite: that there has, in your own words, been vocal uproar.”

Approaching Conferences From a Different Angle | satifice (April 28): “If you say you want or encourage diversity in your CFP, but nowhere do you say that diverse applicants will receive support to attend, you don’t want poor people to attend. Now, I’m sure that some people are thinking “well, if it is a professional conference, what poor people?”, which is disingenous particularly for acdemic related conferences […] Moreover, are we really going to ignore the intersections of poverty with disability, race, gender, and other axes of oppression? If you experience just one type of oppression, your chances of being poor are higher. If you experience multiple axes of oppression, these chances only compound and increase.”

If it Doesn’t Exist, Build it: An Interview With Jasper Nance | Alison Dorantes-Garcia at Huffington Post (May 5): “Alison: Something that initially discouraged me from attending hackerspaces was the lack of people who I could relate to and identify with. For a while I didn’t see many women, queer identified people, people of color, or working-class people. Did you ever feel any trepidation coming into hackerspaces, and if so, how did you deal with it? What advice would you give to a new (potentially shy) person going to a hackerspace? JN: Have a project, and ask for help! Don’t go into [a hackerspace] with any expectations of what other people are doing or think of you. If you ask a lot of questions, you would be surprised how nice and helpful some people can be at hackerspaces.”

Ally Smells: Fear of Speaking Up | Julie Pagano (May 3): “An analogy might help here. Imagine if someone came upon your open source project, didn’t check your README or contributor guidelines, did no background research, and demanded you add a bunch of features that made no sense or have already been discussed ad nauseam. You’d be annoyed. Some people might be kind and discuss it with them. Some might gently point them at documentation. Others would tell them to RTFM (read the fucking manual). Now imagine this happens on your project every day or even multiple times a day. Over time, the RTFM response becomes more common as people run out of patience and energy.”

It’s Different for Girls | Heidi Roizen at Advanetures in Entrepreneurship (May 3): “It pains and somewhat embarrasses me that I am not recommending calling out bad behavior and shaming the individual or individuals responsible. In a perfect world people would have to account for their behavior. But as an entrepreneur who spent years in a daily battle for existence, I did not feel like I could afford the hit I’d take in exposing these incidents.”

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On Software Startup Culture: “So how do startups come to be even more white and male than even the general software industry? And should they be as celebrated and glorified as they are in software culture? I can only speak of my experience as a white trans woman working for a small ~6 employee startup but for me it comes down to risk and the way privilege mitigates those risks.”

The Woman Charged With Making Windows 8 Succeed: “As the head of Windows product development at Microsoft, Julie Larson-Green is responsible for a piece of software used by some 1.3 billion people worldwide. She’s also the person leading the campaign to introduce as many of those people as possible to Windows 8, the dramatic redesign of the iconic operating system that must succeed if Microsoft is to keep pace with a computing industry now shaped more by phones and tablets than desktop PCs… An expert in technical design, she also led the introduction of the novel, much copied “ribbon” interface for Microsoft Office, widely acknowledged as a major improvement in usability.”

Tide of history must change to swim with Nobel penguins: “The locals call it Penguin Mountain. Each year, on December 10, on the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death, residents of Stockholm witness the awarding of the world’s most prestigious prizes in physics, chemistry, physiology, medicine, literature and economics to rows of men in tuxedos. Rows of grave looking, exceptionally clever men in penguin suits. It’s a sobering, thrilling spectacle. But since 1901, only 44 of all 861 Nobel prizes have been given to women.”

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Denise is also an author, published under ‘Denise McCune’ in the Finding the Way and Changing the World collections of Valdemar stories, and an artisan, whose jewelry and stitch markers can be found at the Faultless Pajama Foundry on Etsy.

Trigger warningAssange’s Account Looks Like Accusers’ Account: Assange’s own attorney now effectively concedes that was, at best, what happened here: His victims gave subsequent consent to sexual activity for which explicit consent was neither sought nor given

Why We Can’t Let Design Become a Boys’ Club: This is all such a bummer! We haven’t vaulted ourselves very far above the 1960s stereotypes presented on Mad Men. But it’s not as if women designers and illustrators aren’t out there.

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Adelaide, Australia: 15th International Conference for Women Engineers and Scientists: The International Conference for Women Engineers and Scientists (ICWES) has been held every three years since 1964 and provides an important forum for the exchange of information and ideas for women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). 19–22 July.

Trigger warning: account of harassment, extensive quoted misogynist, homophobic and transphobic language. An occupational hazard?: a long musing on and set of experiences of photography and related harassment.

Women in Computing: A close friend suddenly found himself in position to influence efforts in this area by a Fortune 50 IT company. The company’s declared goal is to make IT careers more attractive to women, starting at K-12 level. The writer wants suggestions. (Warning: many faily existing comments including, eg, suggestions of forced testosterone supplementation!)

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tigtog has some tips for bloggers at How I minimise the online abuse I receive: So here is an assortment of technical tips & tricks whereby bloggers can cut down the volume and the repetition coming from this cyberbullying cadre of keyboard jockeys, making the harassment little more than a tiny hiss of background noise instead of an overwhelming flood of spite.

Eleni Stroulia writes about Women, Computing and Other Minorities “It seems to me that the fundamental reason why there are few women in CS is because our society still (and always) has a gender-specific value system”

Syne Mitchell’s History in Code: After this initial taste of programming success, I decided I wanted to learn computer programming “for reals.” I knew that computers thought in binary, but I wasn’t able to find a binary programming book. So I settled for something called Assembly language. Unfortunately, I had no 8080-assembly compiler handy, so it quickly became an exercise of writing PEEK and POKE code calls on paper to store and recall variable amounts and then checking my work manually. Even a truly geeky thirteen-year-old girl will find this dull after a while.

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The Multiplier Effect of 10,000 Women: Since graduating from the program in February 2009 (a total 119 fellow women entrepreneurs have graduated since its September 2008 launch in Rwanda), Christine’s business has increased profits, expanded into Tanzania and soon plans to venture into the Kenyan market.

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Notice: we currently use delicious.com as a way of getting people to suggest links for these. The future of delicious.com is currently a little unclear, but since they are saying that it will stay up and are currently trying to find a new corporate home for it, we will keep using it for now.

Trigger warnings: rape and rape apology. We’re not even trying to stay on top of the discussions about Julian Assange and rape allegations, but Sady at Tiger Beatdown was dismayed by Michael Moore’s support of him extending to publicly belittling the allegations, and thus started #MooreAndMe, a Twitter campaign to get his attention. Her commentary on the campaign starts here. Meg Thornton has an epic linkspam. Sady describes the end result so far here.

Virtual 3D world is very bright and tangible – but not pink!: The RapChick’s “pink accents’ did made me see red as it seems that pink plus the branding were the only design differences between the RapChick and the Rapman!… Seriously, I do applaud what BfB are doing but to truly democatise 3D printing (as BfB say they are doing), they have to also appeal to all rapidly expanding, underserved audiences. For non technical groups Rapman and RapChick kits are not the way to do this.

Anna Kreider has done some quantitative analysis of depictions of women in various gamer worlds and resources, such as D&D manuals.

A World of Warcraft story: This is a story about a goblin named Mida—Boss Mida <Her Tallness>, to be precise. Boss Mida is no ordinary NPC. Mida was born from a full-throttle player campaign of epic roleplaying enthusiasm

Kinect and the Disabled part 1 and part 2 [spam editor note: “the disabled” terminology here was the choice of AbleGamers]: The AbleGamers Foundation took the Kinect into our lab last week for some stress tests and to see if they followed up on any of the suggestions made at the accessibility Roundtable we attended earlier this year. We wanted to give you our impressions of the much-hyped device as it is now, as well as some insight and predictions to what it might look like in the future.

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the geekfeminism tag on delicious or the #geekfeminism tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

One advantage startups have over established companies is that there are no discrimination laws about starting businesses. For example, I would be reluctant to start a startup with a woman who had small children, or was likely to have them soon. But you’re not allowed to ask prospective employees if they plan to have kids soon.

Which, well, OK, I’m not in the business of forcing Paul Graham to start businesses with people he doesn’t want to start businesses with. But it bugged me for the obvious reasons, not least because, well, you know, men have small children too sometimes. Thank goodness they don’t have to put any work into them. Phew. Lucky escape there, men. Better make sure we keep that labour division in place.

Anyway, in the last few days, Tara Brown wrote this, in response to a few posts by men about having kids and doing a startup.

I am 35 years old, I have an 8 month old child that I breastfeed full-time and I am doing a startup. Big deal. Who isn’t?

Many women start businesses after having a kid, usually because they want to stay home and have an income. This was what I wanted to do after I had Ripley. I decided I wanted to look after him exclusively for his first year and then get a job as a consultant or something where I could continue staying at home with him. My husband and I took off with Ripley to Singapore and France and during that time somehow I ended up a co-founder of Noot.

I have a 9 month old baby (breastfed a fair bit as it happens, although you should have seen him get stuck into ciabatta bread today), and… I’m not doing a startup. I wouldn’t have been a great business partner or core employee for a while after birth, because it made me sick. I wouldn’t be a great partner or employee right now either, in fact, because he brings home illnesses from daycare and so we’re sick and exhausted constantly. (Not that I’m keen to encourage Paul Graham to add to the people he won’t start businesses with, but my husband gets these too, funnily enough.) I did recover our main fileserver when he was 12 days old. Pro tip: if you have any suspicion your hard drive is failing, replace it prior to the birth of your baby. (But then, I had to do the same thing the other week. Pro tip: mobile 9 month olds get in the way of hard drive replacements more than 2 week olds. Wait, that wasn’t a tip. Sorry. Pro tip: don’t have hard drives that fail.) I work various part-time and casual things now to afford the daycare to finish my PhD.

But Tara Brown isn’t telling everyone’s story: she’s telling hers, and she acknowledges that she has some advantages:

Honestly, I never expected to write this blog post because I just figured this is what every other woman that is working and has a baby must do, not something to make a big deal out of. But when I saw that email from Jason Calacanis and Jason Roberts, I just had to speak up so that more women can tell these guys that what they are doing is not extraordinary by any means. I mean come on, Jason Calacanis is rich, his wife stays at home and they have a night nanny. Not exactly a tough situation. What’s tough is single mothers and fathers trying to raise their kids by themselves. Me and the “Jasons” have supportive spouses who are at home for big chunks of time.

So moms dads out there that are doing a startup, tell the world YOUR story. Please! I need to meet more of you for the support and inspiration.

Starting, running and managing businesses, especially small ones, has been women’s work for a long long time, and that means mothers have done it. Mothers have done it a lot. But at the same time, I’m not keen to uncritically contribute to a superwoman culture: get back behind the desk woman! Sickness, disability, parenting and family and education and money demands and life preferences, these all vary a lot more than I would be reluctant to start a startup with a woman who had small children allows for. Sometimes women need to work with small children. Sometimes they need to not. Often it’s in between.

What’s your experience, if you’ve worked as a mother young children? If you’ve been an entrepreneur or business owner, do you think that that was uniformly harder than being an employee, or in some ways easier, or generally easier?

San Francisco, USA: Women 2.0 PITCH Night, 4th November: Watch the finalists of the Startup Competition pitch live, learn firsthand from successful female startup founders how they grew their ideas into industry-changing businesses, and network with hundreds of Women 2.0 members (entrepreneurs, investors, startuppers, and technologists) at our biggest event of the year!

hradzka discusses the Bechdel Test: mechanical approaches: On those occasions that a conversation does turn to why a work fails the Bechdel Test, there are basically two ways that conversation can go. It can turn into an activist discussion of sexism and society, or it can turn into a discussion of the mechanics of writing. There have been a lot of the former, but there haven’t been all that many of the latter.

There’s a UK geek calendar released as a fundraiser for The Libel Reform Campaign, largely featuring geek communicators (geeks who are writers, TV hosts, and so on). See their about page for image links: on first look it seems not to have really sexualised any of the geeks, including the women, very much. What do you think?

People involved in Ubuntu may know Amber Graner and her husband Pete. Unfortunately they lost their house to fire while away at the Ubuntu Developer Summit (their children and pets are all safe and well). Rikki Kite has a fundraiser.

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